We recently spent a week in Colorado where, yes, the scenery was beautiful, no, the altitude did not affect us, and yes, the tour of Colorado’s most interesting crop was – interesting; but I have to tell you my moment to remember story.
Our Colorado friends found us a second floor room at a lodge right outside Rocky Mountain National Park. It sits on one of those fast moving rocky mountain streams that provide background noise to sleep to. Because of the heat wave, our windows and sliders were wide open.
Around 1:30 am I was awakened by a horrible animal cry! I got up and looked out the window into the darkness beyond the light that illuminated the walk beneath our room. The cries got louder and I could see a shape about the size of a fox pacing by the waters edge. it was obviously in distress.
About a minute later, I looked down onto the back of one enormous mama bear. Biggest I have ever seen and obviously not in captivity. She jumped the chest high fence into the thicket, the cries ceased, she (out of my range of vision) jumped back and, followed by her baby , proceeded back to the parking lot where I later learned she reunited with the two cubs she left behind to rescue her baby.
My heart rate returned to normal. I returned to bed. When the couple on the first floor heard how close the mama bear came to their wide open slider, they re-evaluated being first floor with an open door.
I brought my art supplies to Colorado hoping to paint by the side of the river while our group learned to fly fish. Well, I didn’t learn to fly fish, but I didn’t paint much either.
It was a learning experience though. I learned I am not a plein air painter. I don’t enjoy the process of hauling my stuff to a location and then preserving the memory on canvas. My iPhone does that. Rocks are hard to sit on, flying insects are a bother, keeping palette, water, and canvas or paper under control on an uneven surface is impossible. And the worst of it is that the final product is terrible. So back to the studio!
